The invisible women farmers - Agriculture cannot survive without them. By Mrinal Pande
An ex-company
executive-cum-economist turns to the anchor during a discussion on the farmers’
agitation. “Overpopulation is destroying the farming activity. There are simply
too many mouths to feed and the farms are shrinking. We must look to the urban
areas for creating new jobs,” he says. The man at the local paan shop tells no
one in particular: “Yaar, none of the farmers’ children want to dirty their
hands anymore. They wear jeans and own mobiles. They will sell the land as soon
as they inherit”. A respected Hindi anchor turns to a farmers’ representative,
“Kaka (uncle)”, he says, “Our agriculture minister is out somewhere performing
yoga asanas with some baba as our farmer brothers suffer. What do the farmers
really want from the government?” Kaka thinks for a bit. “The farmer has
traditionally never wanted anything from a government except a fair support
price,” he says.
What do these pictures
and dialogues have in common? They have males talking to males about what is
being seen as a totally male problem, to be tackled by males. By now one is
used to such responses from people about the enormous churn going on in our
farming communities. They are only reacting to and repeating messages such as
the ones above. What can life as a woman farmer, daily-wage labourer mean if
women were to start talking?
As women who came of
age in the campuses of the Sixties, many of us avidly read the first ever
(1974) national report on the state of India’s women, Towards Equality, cover
to cover. It revealed, in no uncertain terms, that the rural agricultural
sector was the biggest employer in India. However, unlike male farmers and
cultivators, their female counterparts remained doubly burdened during their
peak productive period with their reproductive role seen as fundamental to
their gender while the duties it entailed were socially created. So even as
women laboured in fields, they continued to have and rear children almost
single-handedly, the report showed.
Nearly two decades
later, working with a group of women on Shram Shakti (the first government
report on India’s women workers in the unorganised sector), this fact was
reconfirmed. The farm sector, even in 1989, employed the largest number of
women workers both as cultivators and daily-wage labourers. But women remained
outside the formal definition of “worker” in the census reports.
Cut to the the 21st
century. The latest census figures list only 32.8 per cent women formally as
primary workers in the agricultural sector, in contrast to 81.1 per cent men.
But the undeniable fact remains that India’s agricultural industry, which
employs 80 to 100 million women, cannot survive without their labour. From
preparing the land, selecting seeds, preparing and sowing to transplanting the
seedlings, applying manure/fertilisers/pesticides and then harvesting,
winnowing and threshing, women work harder and longer than male farmers.
Maintaining the
ancillary branches in this sector, like animal husbandry, fisheries and
vegetable cultivation, depends almost solely on women. So where are these women
while the male farmers and their kakas furiously debate the future of farming,
loans, subsidies and irrigation matters? Men get more than their share of
visibility on TV, in governmental publicity material and within the banking
sectors but millions of women farmers have no spokesperson from their ranks.
The primary reason for
this is that they are usually not listed as primary earners and owners of land
assets within their families. .. read more:
